Hi Ariana,

At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, we have a separate version of TMS for our "Giza Archives Project" (TMS feeds our eMuseum website: www.mfa.org/giza). We use the Sites module intensively for this work, and we use it archaeologically (different from the main MFA main TMS version, which uses Sites for locations within the building). Each tomb around the Giza Pyramids has its own site record, and we use that as the center of our archaeological universe for linking all our diverse data. If you searched for tomb "G 2110" on our website, for example, you'd find there are linked to this site record:

9 objects (objects module)
31 diary pages (media module)
1 modern and 3 ancient individuals (constituents module)
528 photos (media module)
18 plans and drawings (media module)
and soon: downloadable, text-searchable PDF file books and articles (bibliography module)

I'm doing a webinar demo of eMuseum and the Giza website, hosted by Gallery Systems, next Wed, Feb. 20 at 11am. Please contact Lindsey Buck if you want to join:

Lindsey Buck
Sales and Marketing Assistant
Gallery Systems
261 West 35th Street, 12th Floor
New York, NY 10001-1902
t 646 733 2239 ext. 221
f 646 733 2259
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Best wishes,

Peter Manuelian
Giza Archives Project Director
MFA Boston
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-----Original Message-----
From: The Museum System (TMS) Users on behalf of Ariana French
Sent: Thu 2/14/2008 2:36 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Archaeological metadata and the Sites module
 
Hello all,

 

What has been your experience with the Sites module? Do you typically use it
for archaeological purposes? If so, to what extent does it suit your needs
when describing blocks, buildings, rooms, strata, etc.? Do you define one
site per archaeological dig, with subsites defined within, or do you start
the process of defining sites at a more granular level and then create
relationships between the various sites?

 

We're exploring the possibilities of adding archaeological metadata to a
subset of our objects in TMS, but we haven't yet used the Sites module in
this regard. If anyone out there has tackled a similar project, I'd love to
hear your comments on what has worked well for you.

 

Many thanks,

 

Ariana

 

--
Ariana French
Database Administrator
Yale University Art Gallery
phone: (203) 432-7914

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